An enclosure, in Irish archaeological terms, is a defined area set apart by a surrounding bank, ditch, or wall, and could have served any number of purposes, from a ringfort used as a farmstead to a ceremonial or funerary site. What makes the Clashoquirk example quietly sobering is how it came to be known at all: not through excavation or fieldwork, but through an aerial photograph taken by the Air Corps, reference v.311/2963-4, which caught the full outline of the monument from above before the ground told a different story.

The photograph revealed an enclosure sitting on a south-east-facing hillside, but it also revealed the damage already done. A north-west to south-east field boundary cuts directly across the site, and a roadway was laid along the eastern edge of that boundary to carry vehicles to a working quarry. The larger, western portion of the enclosure, the greater part of whatever once stood here, was quarried away entirely. What remains lies to the east of the boundary line, a remnant preserved less by design than by the accident of where the quarry happened to stop. The quarry is no longer operational, and the surrounding land has returned to meadow, giving the hillside a quietly ordinary appearance that gives little away.